Sunday 1 February 2009

Crisis Blogging

Am typing this post up in the middle of working through a pile of undergraduate scripts the height (and frankly quality) of one of those piles of triceratops shit from Jurassic Park. Hence my plan to ruthlessly mock Richard Littlejohn has fallen by the wayside [1]. Instead, I present the long-delayed second part of "Musicians You Are Too Stupid To Know Exist."

This time round we worship at the altar of James Yorkston. I put up one of his songs way back during the Radio Ljubljana sessions, but I think he's worthy of another look.

This is Yorkston playing "St Patrick" with his original backing band, a bunch of his mates working under the name "The Athletes" (generator of one of my all-time favorite Wikipedia quotes "None of them, however, are actually athletes; indeed, the accordion player... has been seen smoking a pipe").



And this is the title track from his latest album, When The Haar Rolls In.



Obviously my continual descent into the bowels of folk music is as much a surprise to me as anyone, but in Yorkston's case at least, I suspect the explanation is pretty simple: these are songs about the broken heart post-whine, which I guess is the next logical step for my music taste.

Also, the guy started out in a punk band, which we all know is awesome, as proven by Frank Turner, who may be showing up in one of these posts sometime soon.

[1] Feel free to do it yourself if you want. He takes a perfectly reasonable question (did Social Services dismiss the grandparents of a child taken away from her mother as potential foster parents), and spins it into an article that suggests the social workers involved received bonuses for their choice (due to a homosexual quota system Littlejohn is convinced must be in place, for some reason), and that they resemble professional kidnappers hired by paedophiles to snatch children from their families.

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